In an interview in connection with the story , historian Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg ( University of Giessen ) stated that war criminals sometimes tried to escape justice after 1945 by presenting themselves victims of Nazi persecution , rather than as perpetrators . Many former Soviet POWs , former slave laborers , and concentration camp inmates who found themselves as refugees were motivated to seek anonymity , create aliases , and hide their Soviet Union origins to avoid forced repatriation to Stalinist Russia under the terms of the Yalta Agreement . Many former Soviet POWs , and Soviets who fought against the Red Army were also motivated to conceal their Soviet origins to avoid being executed under secret Allied military operations such as Operation Keelhaul . After the war ended , there were millions of former forced laborers OST-Arbeiter in occupied Germany , most of whom were Ukrainian , but also Russian , Belarusian , Crimean Tatar , and others . Many of them , having experienced the brutal and genocidal policies of the Stalin regime , wanted to emigrate to the US or other western democracies rather than being forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union
Yalta Agreement
Yalta Conference
John Demjanjuk