The Minister and the Massacres The Minister and the Massacres is a 1986 book written by Nikolai Tolstoy that described the 1945 Bleiburg repatriations as well as the Cossack repatriations . The book ' s criticism the British repatriation of collaborationist troops to Josip Broz Tito ' s Yugoslav government was in turn the target of strong criticism . It continued on the topic Tolstoy started with " Victims of Yalta " ( 1977 ) and " Stalin ' s Secret War " ( 1981 ) , and led to a 1989 lawsuit in which Tolstoy was found guilty of libel . Contents . In the book , Tolstoy accused Harold Macmillan , " minister resident " in the Mediterranean then and later prime minister , to persuade the British General Alexander to ignore a telegram of the Foreign Office that would have excluded individuals who were not Soviet citizens by British law from " repatriation " ; application of this directive would have separated Cossacks into emigres and those from the Soviet Union , the former , of course , not subject to repatriation . Another person of interest was Toby Low , 1st Baron Aldington , who was implicated by Tolstoy as giving a key order on May 21 , 1945 that sealed the fate of Cossacks including the emigres . In referencing the documents of that time , Tolstoy quoted a General Alexander telegram , sent to the Combined Chiefs of Staff , where Alexander mentioned " 25 , 000 German and Croat units " . Further , in a second telegram sent to Combined Chiefs of Staff , Alexander asked for guidelines regarding the final disposition of “ 50 , 000 Cossacks including 11 . 000 women , children and old men ; present estimate of total 35 , 000 Chetniks – 11 , 000 of them already evacuated to Italy – and 25 , 000 German and Croat units . ” In each of above cases “ return them to their country of origin immediately might be fatal to their health . ” Further , Tolstoy " reconstructed what happened when , on May 31 , the commandant of the military camp at Viktring , ' Lieutenant Ames ' , reported that he had received orders for 2 , 700 of the civilian refugees in Major Barre ' s camp to be taken to Rosenbach and Bleiburg the following day , to be handed over to Tito ' s partisans . " Reception . Alistair Horne wrote : Stevan K . Pavlowitch wrote : Christopher Booker , who had initially supported Tolstoy , later altered his position when he wrote about it in his lengthy analysis of the Bleiburg controversy in " A Looking Glass Tragedy . The Controversy over the Repatriations from Austria in 1945 " . He wrote that " many " massacres " described in lurid detail never took place " . Booker puts the case that Tolstoy distorts the story contrary to the facts , and that there are no traces in the archives of any massacre ever committed in or around Bleiburg or its surroundings ( there being only nine documents in the British Army archives related to Bleiburg in May 1945 ) . He notes Tolstoy ' s reliance on three eyewitnesses who were describing events 40 years before and who were very partial . Almost simultaneously Ian Mitchell wrote in " The Cost of a Reputation " ( about the ensuing libel case ) that the archives had been weeded of most of the incriminating documents , but criticised Tolstoy for ending his book with an unsubstantiated smear that Macmillan was an ally of the NKVD . In response to Booker , Laurence Rees wrote that historians should treat every source they use sceptically . That applies to written sources just as much as eye - witnesses . Libel case . Tolstoy had been in contact with a property developer , Nigel Watts , who had a dispute with Lord Aldington over an unpaid insurance claim ( Aldington was chairman of Sun Alliance ) . In his dispute with Aldington , Watts sought to attack his character by drawing together the accusations made in " The Minister and the Massacres " . Tolstoy wrote a 2 , 000 word text for him , and Watts then published a pamphlet called " War Crimes and the Wardenship of Winchester College " which he distributed to anyone he thought might have heard of Lord Aldington . The pamphlet prompted Aldington to sue Watts for libel ; Tolstoy insisted on being added as a defendant . Aldington also sued Century Hutchinson as publishers of " The Minister and the Massacres " ; in June 1989 , before the pamphlet case came to trial , Century Hutchinson accepted the accusations in the book were untrue , paid £30 , 000 damages and agreed not to republish the book . He went on to win his case against Watts and Tolstoy , who in turn was subsequently bankrupted . In Lord Aldington ' s obituary , Andrew Roth indicated that Tolstoy ' s criticism of Aldington was misdirected and should have targeted Macmillan and Winston Churchill .