The Soviet Union’s 1936 constitution afforded “the right of asylum to foreign citizens persecuted for defending the interests of the working people.” But Soviet authorities shamefully broke this promise when dealing with hundreds of German and Austrian exiles, handing them over to the Nazis from the late 1930s on. The victims included veteran revolutionaries, Jewish communists, and militant anti-fascists.

One of the deportees was the German communist Margarete Buber-Neumann. Her memoir, published in 1949 in English with the title Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler, is probably the best-known account by one of the deportees. Buber-Neumann described the moment that Soviet officials transferred her to Nazi custody with twenty-nine others:

At last the train came to a halt, and for the last time we heard the familiar shout: “Get ready. With things.” The compartment doors were unlocked . . . a little distance away was a station. We could just see the name on a nearby signal box: Brest-Litovsk.