Was Roosevelt the "biggest slave trader in recorded history"?

Question

In the introduction to The Liberation of the Serfs, Jürgen Georg Backhaus writes:

The largest transaction in unfree labour ever recorded occurred in Yalta; more than 6.5 million prisoners of war were handed over to Russia and France, making Roosevelt the biggest slave trader in recorded history. (Google Books.)

My guess is that the above author is talking about the Yalta Conference, but I could find nothing when I googled "Yalta conference 6.5 million prisoners of war". So what on earth is the above author talking about? Did Roosevelt hand over 6.5m POWs to Russia and France?

Answer 1

This relies in willfully mistaking figurative language for non-figurative speech.

Roosevelt didn't "trade" those people in the sense that a slave trader traded his captives. He made a political pact which included handing prisoners of war to a foreign power. There was no selling of human individuals in that; it is a "trade" only rhetorically, in that a political pact involves both sides making concessions, which may be roughly similar to the concessions made by people selling and buying things.

Also, those people were not "slaves" in any technical terms; there were no "slaves" in the Soviet Union. Slaves are property that can be bought and sold; we use the word "slave" in many different figurative senses, some very foolish, others not so much. And the condition of POWs returned to the SU may have been dire, even similar to slavery in the 19th century Americas, so the rhetorics may have some merit here. But to attempt to make a factual statement that "Roosevelt was the biggest slave trader in recorded history" and intend it to be taken as an accurate description of what really happened is to mistake electoral campaign rhetorics for a scientific description.

Answer 2

As SJuan76 has pointed out, this quotation is about GERMAN prisoners of war who were left in captivity in the Soviet Union and France, rather than repatriated to what was left of Germany. This was decided at Yalta. It is not about SOVIET prisoners of war. I do not know where the figure of 6.5 million comes from, and I am even less able to understand why the author blames this situation on Roosevelt, and not also on Churchill, or indeed Stalin, all of whom were signatories of the Yalta agreement. Herr Professor Backhaus evidently has an axe to grind.

Answer 3

The reference here is to the forced repatriation of Soviet POWs, forced labourers, and émigrés after WWII. There is scattered information about it in wiki here.

However, the number 6.5 million seems a gross overestimate (2 million - which also is surely a huge number! - is the likelier figure).

I also don't quite understand why France is mentioned there.

Perhaps he is referring to the fact that returning French prisoners faced some opprobrium and shaming, though nothing like the harsh treatment given by the Soviet state to its returning prisoners. But I doubt that any significant number of French prisoners had to be coerced into returning to France at all, as in the Soviet case.