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The Katyń massacre, also known as the Katyn Forest Massacre, was the mass execution of Polish citizens by the Soviet Union during World War II. In the course of the massacre approximately 22,000 Polish citizens were executed in three mass murder sites in the spring of 1940.
Most of the killed were reserve officers taken prisoner during the course of the Polish Defensive War of 1939. Since Poland's conscription system required every university graduate to become a reserve officer, the Soviets were thus able to round up much of the Polish, Jewish and Belarusian intelligentsia.
Background
Initially the expression referred to the massacre of the Polish military officers confined at the Kozielsk Prisoner of War (POW) camp in Katyn Forest near the village of Gnezdovo, a short distance from Smolensk, Soviet Union. More recently the phrase also became associated with the murder of about 22,000 Polish citizens - POWs from Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostashkov camps and inmates from West Belarusian and West Ukrainian prisons, shot on Stalin's orders in Katyn forest and the prisons of Kalinin (Tver), Kharkov and other Soviet cities.
Many Poles had become prisoners of war following the invasion and defeat of Poland by the Nazis and the Soviet Union in September 1939, one week after the signing of their secret Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, or Hitler-Stalin Pact. Many POW camps were used for the internment of Polish captives, including camps Ostashkov, Kozielsk, and Starobielsk. Kozielsk and Starobielsk were used mainly for officers, while Ostashkov was mainly used for scouts, gendarmes, policemen and jailers. Contrary to a widespread misconception, only about 8,000 out of about 15,000 POWs in these camps were officers.
On March 5, 1940, according to a note to Stalin prepared by Lavrenty Beria, members of Soviet politburo – Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Mikhail Kalinin, Kliment Voroshilov, and 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. This resulted in the murder of about 22,000 Polish citizens, including about 15,000 prisoners of war. The broad definition of the accused included significant numbers of Polish intelligentsia 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 1990, when the USSR acknowledged that NKVD was responsible for the massacre and coverup.
Soviet preparations
As early 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, Pyotr 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), Starobielsk, Vologod (rail station of Zaenikevo) and Gryazovets camps.
In the period from April 3 to May 19 1940 about 22,000 POWs and prisoners were murdered: about 6000 POWs from the Ostashkov camp, about 4,000 POWs from the Starobielsk camp, about 4500 POWs from the Kozielsk camp, and about 7000 prisoners in Western parts of Belarus and Ukraine.
A mere 395 prisoners were saved from the slaughter. They were taken to the Yukhnov camp and then to Gryazovets. They 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 inner NKVD prison of Kharkov and the bodies were buried near Pyatikhatki; and police officers from Ostashkov were murdered in the inner NKVD prison of Kalinin (Tver) and buried in Miednoje.
Detailed information on the executions in Kalinin NKVD prison was given during the hearing by Dmitrii S. Tokarev, former head of the Board of the District NKVD in Kalinin.
According to Tokarev, the shooting started in the evening and ended at dawn. The first transport on April 4, 1940, carried 390 people, and the executioners had a hard time killing so many people during one night. The following transports were no greater than 250 people. The executions were usually performed with German made Walther-type pistols supplied by Moscow.
The executions were methodical. After the condemned's personal information was checked, he was then handcuffed and led to a cell insulated with a felt-lined door. The sounds of the execution were also masked by the operation of loud machines (perhaps fans) throughout the night. After being taken into the cell, the victim was immediately shot 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.
Near Smolensk, the Poles, with their hands tied behind their backs, were led to the graves and shot in the neck.
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. When Polish general Władysław Anders began organizing this army, he requested information about the Polish officers. Stalin assured him and Sikorski during a personal meeting that all the Poles had been freed, though some of them may have escaped (for example, to Manchuria).
The fate of the missing prisoners remained a mystery until April 1943 when the German Wehrmacht discovered the mass grave of more than 4,000 Polish military reserve officers in the forest on Goat Hill near Katyn. Dr. Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, saw this discovery 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 General Smorawiński 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 an ensuing International Red Cross investigations of the Katyń 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 Władysław Sikorski insisted on bringing this matter to the negotiation table with Soviets and on an investigation by the International Red Cross. Stalin used the Katyń Massacre "unsupported allegations" as the pretext to withdraw recognition of Sikorski's government in Britain on April 26, accuse it of collaborating with Nazi Germany, and start a 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 suddenly two months later. The cause of his death is still disputed.
Attempts to cover up the massacre
The Katyń Massacre was beneficial to Nazi Germany, whose propaganda machine used it to discredit the 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 Katyń Massacre and the resulting Polish-Soviet crisis were beginning to threaten the vital alliance with 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 due to the entry into the conflict of the military and industrial giants, the Soviet Union and the United States. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D Roosevelt were 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 were 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 Katyń area, in January 1944, the Soviet Union sent the "Special Commission for Determination and Investigation of the Shooting of Polish Prizoners of War by German-Fascist Invaders in Katyn Forest," headed by Nikolai Burdenko to investigate the incidents again. Burdenko, the President of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR, exhumed the bodies again and reached the conclusion that the shooting was done by Germans.
In private, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill agreed that the atrocity was likely carried out by the Soviets. According to the note taken by Count Raczyński, 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." 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 Roosevelt assigned Army Captain George Earle, his special emissary to the Balkans, to compile information on Katyn. Earle did so, using contacts in just 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.
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 November 1945, seven officers of the German Wehrmacht, K.H. Strueffling, H. Remlinger, E. Böhom, E. Sommerfeld, H. Jannike, E. Skotki and E. Geherer were tried by a court of the victorious allies: the Americans, the English, the French and the Russians. They were condemned to death for their role in the Katyń massacre and were subsequently hanged. Three more were tried on the same charges; E.P. Vogel, F. Wiese, A. Diere. They received sentences of 20 years of hard labor, were turned over to the Russians and never heard of again.
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 Katyń 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.
In 1951-52, 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 NKVD had executed the Poles, and confirmed two other burial sites similar to the site at Katyń: Mednoje and Pyatikhatki. In 1992 the 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 Kozelsk, Ostashkov and Starobels camps, and from certain prisons of Western Ukraine and Belarus with the signature of Stalin (among others); an 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. Still, there are some who deny Soviet guilt, call the released documents fakes and try to prove that Poles were shot by Germans in 1941.
Post-Soviet 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 Katyń Massacre to the Polish authorities as soon as it is declassified. In March 2005 Russian authorities ended the decade-long investigation. Russian Chief Military Prosecutor Alexander Savenkov declared that the massacre was not a genocide - a war crime - or a crime against humanity and that there is absolutely no basis to talk about this in judicial terms. Despite earlier declarations, 116 out of 183 volumes of files gathered during the Russian investigation, as well as the decision to put an end to it, were classified.
Because of that, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance has decided to open its own probe. Prosecution team head Leon Kieres said they would try to identify those involved in ordering and carrying out the killings. In addition, on March 22, 2005, the Polish Sejm unanimously passed an act, requesting the Russian archives to be declassified. The Sejm also requested Russia to classify the Katyń massacre as genocide.
See also:
- Anti-Polonism
- Zbigniew Brzeziński
- Stefan Kaczmarz
- Józef Mackiewicz
- Józef Marcinkiewicz
- List of Polish Martyrology sites
- Polish operation of the NKVD
- Konstanty Plisowski
- Janus K. Zawodny
- Frank Fox
- Robert G. Poirier
References
- Allen, Paul, Katyn: The Untold Story of Stalin's Polish Massacre, Scribner Book Company, 1991, ISBN 0684192152.
- Irving, David, Accident -- The Death of General Sikorski, 1967, ISBN 0718304209.
- Zawodny, Janusz K., Death in the Forest: The Story of the Katyn Forest Massacre, University of Notre Dame Press, 1962, ISBN 0268008493.
External links
- Original of Katyn order
- Wikisource:Katyn Order of Execution by Stalin (English language translation)
- Detail account of Soviet actions
- Fischer, Benjamin B., "The Katyn Controversy: Stalin's Killing Field", Studies in Intelligence, Winter 1999-2000.
- Katyn massacre victim list
- http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=27886543
- Polish deaths at Soviet hands - website about Katyn forest massacre
- Pictures taken during the 1943 exhumation
- British reactions to the Katyn Massacre, 1943-2003
- The Katyn Massacre: A Special Operations Executive perspective
- Goebbels' diary entries on Katyn
- Katyn in Nuremberg
- The full text of David Irving's controversial 1967 book on the death of Sikorski, contains large chapter on the political consequences of Katyn