George Kennan, the architect of Washington’s Cold War “containment strategy” against the Soviet Union, bemoaned later in life that Public Law 86-90, which established Captive Nations Week and paved the way for the private, far-right National Captive Nations Committee, symbolically committed the U.S. to the liberation of countries “invented in the Nazi propaganda ministry.” The ABN played a prominent role in the so-called “captive nations movement,” and had a relationship with the two principal authors of the joint congressional resolution (one of them perhaps only years later). To quote from my “Death to Captive Nations Week”:

The ABN’s Idel-Ural and Cossackia committees indeed originated in Nazi Germany’s conquest of the Soviet Union. Vasili Glaskov, a longtime leader of the “Cossack Liberation Movement” who appeared at a 1950 ABN conference in Scotland, was a Nazi puppet during World War II. In those days he proclaimed “Cossackia” to be “in the hands of the Great World Reformer,” Adolf Hitler, who “categorically decided to end the Jewish-Bolshevik plague.”

The ABN’s Idel-Ural component most likely traced back to the Nazis’ World War II-era Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, known as the Ostministerium (East Ministry), and perhaps the Wehrmacht’s Idel Ural Legion. Gerhard von Mende, a Baltic German Nazi, led the Caucasus branch of the ministry. His boss, Alfred Rosenberg, was executed in 1946 as a result of the Nuremberg trials, but the West German government soon enough set von Mende up with an Eastern Europe Research Service to continue his work, trying to manage what remained of the ministry’s anti-Russian “national committees.”

Some of von Mende’s former acquaintances wound up joining the ABN, and even its leadership. The CIA received word that von Mende allegedly shepherded his Ostministerium contacts into the arms of the Banderite-led Bloc, supposedly as a talent pool for British intelligence, which did in fact support the ABN and OUN-B in the early years of the Cold War. “MI6 first contacted [OUN-B] through Gerhard von Mende in April 1948,” according to a book published by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

(Emphasis added.)