Katyn massacre

The Katyń Forest Massacre, also known as the Katyn massacre, refers to the mass execution of Polish military officers by the Soviet Union during World War II. The Massacre occurred in the Soviet Union, in a forest near Gnezdovo village, a short distance from Smolensk. Many Poles had become prisoners of war following the invasion and defeat of Poland by the Nazis and the Soviet Union in September 1939. The Soviets filtered out any army and police officers and gathered them in three camps: Kozielsk, Ostaszkowo and Starobielsk. In addition, the registration of all army and police officers, including retired and reserved were forced on the areas of Eastern Poland. The registered persons were subsequently arrested and deported to the same three POW camps.

Since the conscription system in Poland required every university graduate to become a reserve officer, the Soviets gathered the most important individuals from the Polish, Jewish and Belorussian intelligentsia. On Christmas Eve of 1939, all priests of every confession, including Catholics, Orthodox, Jews, Protestants and Greek Catholics were removed from the camps and probably murdered separately.

On March 5, 1940, members of Soviet politburo – Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Mikhail Kalinin, Kliment Voroshilov, and Lavrenty Beria – signed an order of execution of "nationalist and counterrevolutionary" activists kept in camps and prisons of the occupied Western parts of Ukraine and Belarus, according to a note to Stalin prepared by Beria. This eventually resulted in the murder of 25,700 Polish citizens, including 14,700 prisoners of war. The wide definition of the accused put significant numbers of Polish intelligentsia into the death row, in addition to policemen, reservists, and active military officers.

The discovery of the massacre precipitated the severance of diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and the Polish government-in-exile in London in 1943. The Soviet Union denied the accusations until 1992, when with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian officials released documents proving that the Soviet Politburo and the NKVD were responsible for the massacre and coverup.

Soviet preparations

As soon as September 19, 1939, the First Rank Commissar of the State Security, Lavrentii Pavlovich Beria (the People's Commissar for Internal Affairs) called the Board of the NKVD of the USSR for Prisoners of War and the Interned (Head: State Security Captain, Peter K. Soprunenko) ordered to set up camps for Polish prisoners. These were: Jukhnovo (rail station of Babynino), Yuzhe (Talitsy), Kozelsk, Kozelshchyna, Oranki, Ostashkov (Stolbnyi Island on Seliger Lake near Ostashkov), Putyvli (rail station of Tetkino), Starobelsk, Vologod (rail station of Zaenikevo) and Gryazovets camps.

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1943 exhumation

In the period from April 3 to May 19 1940 a total of 14,552 prisoners were murdered: 4421 from the Kozielsk camp, 6311 from the Ostashkov camp and 3982 from the Starobielsk camp - in the Katyń Forest, Kalinin (Tver today) and Kharkov. A mere 395 prisoners were saved from the slaughter. They were taken to the Yukhnov camp and then to Gryazovets. Those were the only ones who escaped death.

Technology of the massacre

Up to 99% of the remaining prisoners were subsequently murdered. People from Kozielsk were murdered in the usual mass murder site of Smolensk country, called Katyn forest; people from Starobielsk were murdered in the usual mass murder site of Kharkov country, in the area of the city of Kharkov; and police officers from Ostaszkowo were murdered in the usual mass murder site of Pskow country, called Miednoje. These places already included a number of mass grave sites, as the Soviets had used them as execution sites for their citizens for a long period of time.

Poles were transported by train to the station nearest a murder site (eg. for Katyn, the station was called Gniazdowo), and were transported from the station to the place of execution in trucks with blinded screens. Every individual was separately bound and taken to the side of the grave, shot in the back of the head, and then pushed or allowed to fall into the grave. No less than 100 people were transported and killed daily in this way.

Miednoje

Detailed information on the executions was given during the hearing by Dmitrii S. Tokarev, former head of the Board of the District NKVD in Kalinin.

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Polish money and military badges found in the mass graves

According to Tokarev the shooting started in the evening and ended at dusk. The first transport on 4 April was 390 strong and the executioners had a hard time doing their duty with so many people during one night. The following transport were not greater than 250 people. The executions were usually performed with Walther-type pistols supplied by Moscow.

The executions were carried out as follows. After the condemned's personal information was checked, he was then handcuffed and led to a cell insulated with a felt-lined door. In addition, the sounds of the execution were masked through the operation of loud machines (perhaps fans) throughout the night time. After being taken into the cell the victim was immediately shot dead in the back of the head. His body was then taken out through the opposite door and laid in one of the five or six waiting trucks, whereupon the next condemned was taken inside. The procedure went on every night, except for the May Day holiday.

Discovery

The fate of Polish POWs was first raised soon after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, when the Polish government-in-exile (located in London) and the Soviet government agreed to cooperate against Germany, and a Polish army on Soviet territory was to be formed. The Polish general Wladyslaw Anders began organizing this army, but when he requested that 15,000 Polish prisoners of war whom the Soviets had once held at camps near Smolensk be transferred to his command, the Soviet government informed him in December 1941 that most of those prisoners had escaped to Manchuria and could not be located.

The fate of the missing prisoners remained a mystery until April 1943, when the Wehrmacht discovered the mass grave of over 4000 Polish officers in the forest near Katyn. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Nazi Propaganda saw this dicovery as an excellent tool to drive a wedge between Poland, Western Allies and the Soviet Union. On April 13 Berlin Radio announced this find to the world: "A great pit was found, 28 metres long and 16 metres wide, filled with twelve layers of bodies of Polish officers, numbering about 3,000. They were clad in full military uniform, and while many of them had their hands tied, all of them had wounds in the back of their necks caused by pistol shots. The identification of the bodies will not cause great difficulties because of the mummifying property of the soil and because the Bolsheviks had left on the bodies the identity documents of the victims. It has already been ascertained that among the murdered is a General Smorawinski from Lublin."

The Allies were aware that the Nazis had found a mass grave, as the discovery transpired, via radio transmissions intercepted and decrypted by Bletchley Park. The Soviet government denied the German charges and claimed that the Poles, war prisoners, had been engaged in construction work west of Smolensk and consequently were captured and executed by invading German units in August 1941. Both German and and ensuing Red Cross investigations of the Katyn corpses soon produced physical evidence that the massacre took place in early 1940, at a time when the area was still under Soviet control.

In April 1943, when Polish Government in Exile led by General Wladyslaw Sikorski insisted on bringing this matter to the negotiations table with Soviets and on investigation by the International Red Cross, Stalin used the Katyn Massacre unsupported allegiations as the pretext to withdraw recognition to Sikorski's government in Britain on April 26, accuse it of collaborating with Nazi Germany and start the campaign to get the Western Allies to recognize the Soviet puppet Polish government led by Wanda Wasilewska. Sikorski, whose uncompromising stance on that issue was beginning to create a rift between Western Allies and Soviets, died two months later and the causes of his death are still disputed.

Attempts to cover up the massacre

The Katyn Massacre was beneficial only to the Nazi Germany, whose propaganda used it to discredit Soviet Union. Dr Goebbels wrote in his diary: "“Foreign commentators marvel at the extraordinary cleverness with which we have been able to convert the Katyn incident into a highly political question". The Germans had succeeded in discrediting the Soviet Government in the eyes of the world and briefly raised the spectre of a communist monster rampaging across the territories of Western civilisation; moreover they had forged the unwilling General Sikorski into a tool which could threaten to unravel the alliance between the Western Allies and Soviet Union.

To the Western Allies, the Katyn Massacre threatened and the Polish-Soviet crisis was beginning to threaten the vital alliance the Soviet Union at a time when the Poles' importance to the Allies, essential in the first years of the war, was beginning to fade with the entry into the conflict of the military and industrial giants, the Soviet Union and the United States. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt where increasingly torn between their commitments to their Polish Ally, the uncompromising stance of Sikorski and the demands - often bordering on political blackmail - by Stalin and his diplomats, whose policies where evident in the comments of Soviet ambassador to London, Ivan Maisky, who told Churchill that Poland's fate was sealed as "a country of 20 millions next door to a country of 200 millions".

Having retaken the Katyn area, in January 1944, the Soviet "Special Commission for Determination and Investigation of the Shooting of Polish Prizoners of War by German-Fascists Invaders in Katyn Forest" headed by the President of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR Nikolai Burdenko exhumed the bodies again and reached the "conclusion" that the shooting was done by German occupants.

In private, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill agreed that the attrocity was likely carried out by the Soviets. According to the note taken by Count Raczynski, Mr Churchill admitted on April 15 during a conversation with General Sikorski: "Alas, the German revelations are probably true. The Bolsheviks can be very cruel.”". However at the same time, on April 24, Churchill assured the Russians: "We shall certainly oppose vigorously any ‘investigation’ by the International Red Cross or any other body in any territory under German authority. Such investigation would be a fraud and its conclusions reached by terrorism.". Mr Churchill’s own post-war account of the Katyn affair is laconic. In his memoirs, he quotes the 1944 Russian inquiry into the massacre, which predictably proved that the Germans had committed the crime, and adds, "belief seems an act of faith.".

In 1944 President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt assigned Captain George Earle, his special emissary to the Balkans, to compile information on Katyn. Earle did so, using contacts in Bulgaria and Romania. Earle too concluded that the Soviet Union was guilty. After consulting with Elmer Davis, the director of the Office of War Information, FDR rejected that conclusion, saying that he was convinced of Nazi Germany's responsibility, and ordered Earle's report suppressed. When Earle formally requested permission to publish his findings, the President gave him a written order to desist. Earle was reassigned and spent the rest of the war in American Samoa.

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Biggest of the mass graves at Katyn

After World War II, the Polish Communist authorities covered up the matter in concord with Soviet propaganda, deliberately censoring any sources that might shed some light on the Soviet crime. The truth was not publicly known until the fall of communism in 1989.

In 1946, the chief Soviet prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials tried to indict Germany for the Katyn killings, stating that "one of the most important criminal acts for which the major war criminals are responsible was the mass execution of Polish prisoners of war shot in the Katyn forest near Smolensk by the German fascist invaders," but dropped the matter after the United States and the United Kingdom refused to support it and German lawyers mounted an embarrassing defense. Katyn is not mentioned in any of the Nuremberg judgements. In 1951-1952, a U.S. Congressional investigation charged that the Poles had been killed by Soviets.

The question of responsibility remained controversial in the West as well as behind the Iron Curtain. For example, in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s, plans for a memorial to the victims bearing the date 1940 (rather than 1941) were condemned as provocative in the political climate of the Cold War.

In 1989 Soviet scholars revealed that Joseph Stalin had indeed ordered the massacre, and in 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev admitted that the Narodny Kommisariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD) had executed the Poles, confirmed two other burial sites similar to the site at Katyn — Mednoe and Pyatikhatki. In 1992, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian officials released top-secret documents from the sealed package no. 1. Among them was Lavrenty Beria's March 1940 proposal to shoot 25,700 Poles from Kozel'skij, Ostashkovskij and Starobel'skij camps, and from certain prisons of Western Ukraine and Belorussia with the signature of Stalin (among others); excerpt from the Politburo shooting order of March 5 1940; and Aleksandr Shelepin's March 3 1959 note to Nikita Khrushchev, with information about the execution of 21,857 Poles and with the proposal to destroy their personal files.

The investigations that indicted the German state rather than the Soviet state for the killings are sometimes used to impeach the Nuremberg Trials in their entirety, often in support of Holocaust denial, or to question the legitimacy and/or wisdom of using the criminal law to prohibit Holocaust denial. It should be noted that there are some who deny Soviet guilt, call the released documents fakes and try to prove that Poles were shot by Germans in 1941.

Recent developments

During Aleksander Kwaśniewski's visit to Russia in September of 2004, Russian officials announced that they are willing to transfer all the information on the Katyn Massacre to the Polish authorities as soon as it is declassified.

External links

References

Irving, David, Accident -- The Death of General Sikorski (1967) ISBN 0718304209