The Katyn Deception

Karol POLEJOWSKI

85 years ago, the Soviets massacred Polish officers. Later, they did everything in their power to murder the truth about this crime as well.

Lieutenant Colonel John H. Van Vliet Jr. would never forget the mass graves filled with decomposing bodies in Polish officer uniforms. Every victim ‘had a bullet hole at the back of the head near the neck,’ and some had their hands bound with a cord.

Van Vliet was among a group of American and British prisoners of war whom the Germans took to the Katyn Forest near Smolensk in the spring of 1943. These Allied officers became unwitting witnesses to the exhumations overseen by Professor Gerhard Buhtz. ‘I wanted to believe that the whole thing was a frame-up,’ Van Vliet later confessed. He clung to the hope that the massacres were the work of the Germans, attempting to pin the blame on the Soviets to drive a wedge between them and their allies in the anti-Hitler coalition. Further analysis, however, changed his mind. ‘I believe Russians did it,’ he said after regaining his freedom and returning to the United States.

Unbiased accounts, such as Van Vliet’s testimony, posed a significant threat to the Soviet Union’s reputation. So when the Germans exposed the murder of thousands of Polish officers, the Soviets had no intention of admitting responsibility. They mobilised their secret services and entire propaganda machinery to convince the world that Germany was to blame. Thus was born the Katyn lie, a fabrication perpetuated for years.

Murdered Elite

In September 1939, Poland suffered two devastating blows. The first was delivered by the Wehrmacht, and the second, less than three weeks later, by the Red Army. Two totalitarian and supposedly ideologically irreconcilable regimes – Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union – had recently signed a devilish pact to carve up Central Europe. The Polish Army couldn’t withstand the joint assault, which resulted in the country falling under the control of two occupying powers.

Both the Germans and the Soviets imposed terror on the lands they seized. In the Eastern Borderlands, annexed by the USSR, this terror took the form of mass arrests and deportations of civilians to Siberia and other remote regions. The repression focused on Poland’s elite, including intellectuals, uniformed personnel, officials, landowners, wealthier farmers and their families.

The plan to execute more than twenty thousand individuals – Polish prisoners of war and political detainees – was first presented to dictator Joseph Stalin on 2 March 1940 by his trusted confidant, the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs Lavrentiy Beria. The head of the NKVD argued that all these people were ‘declared enemies of the Soviet power with no hope of rehabilitation.’ Within days, the Politburo approved his proposal.

On 3 April, the first group of prisoners was transported from Kozelsk to Katyn for execution. Mass killings occurred not only in the Katyn forest but also in Kharkiv, Kalinin (now Tver), Kyiv and other locations. Over several weeks, the Soviets murdered at least 21,768 people, including Polish Army officers (many of them reservists with civilian jobs), policemen and other members of uniformed services. The victims included several hundred people of Jewish descent.

The families received no word about their loved ones’ deaths. When letters from them suddenly stopped arriving, they had every reason to believe it was merely a temporary lapse in communication.

The Polish government-in-exile was concerned about the fate of the missing officers. After June 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the USSR, these officers should theoretically have been released. But Stalin acted like he had no idea what became of them. ‘They escaped,’ he told General Władysław Sikorski, the Polish Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief.

Anatomy of Lie

In April 1943, the Germans announced the discovery of mass graves of Polish officers in Katyn. They devoted considerable effort to making sure the world knew that these men were victims of the NKVD. They brought an international medical commission, representatives from the Polish Red Cross, other Polish citizens and even Oflag prisoners to the exhumation site.

The Soviets responded with a deceitful statement, blaming the crime on the Germans. This version was later endorsed by the so-called Burdenko Commission, which conducted its work in Katyn in January 1944, after the Wehrmacht had been driven out of the Smolensk region by the Red Army.

The Soviet authorities went so far as to bring the Katyn case before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which prosecuted high-ranking Nazi officials between 1945 and 1946. ‘In September 1941, 11,000 Polish officers, who were prisoners of war, were killed in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk,’ read the indictment. However, the ‘evidence’ proved worthless, and the Nuremberg verdict passed over the case altogether.

During the Second World War, the Western powers had no interest in challenging the Katyn lie. Stalin was a necessary ally against Germany and later Japan. ‘If Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons,’ admitted British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. US President Franklin Roosevelt, for his part, was utterly convinced that a new world order could be built in cooperation with the Soviet dictator.

It wasn’t until the Cold War intensified in the late 1940s and early 1950s that the situation changed. In 1951, the United States Congress established the Special Committee to Investigate the Katyn Massacre, known as the Madden Committee. It thoroughly examined the available documents and interviewed many witnesses, including those who had been at the site during the exhumations in 1943. The Madden Report, published in December 1952, unequivocally attributed responsibility for the Katyn massacre to the Soviet Union.

Yet neither this document nor the meticulous studies of the Polish émigré community on Katyn had any chance of official recognition in the countries that fell under Soviet influence after the war. In 1952, the communist government in Warsaw reiterated: ‘The massacre of thousands of Polish officers and soldiers at Katyn was the work of Nazi criminals.’

Anyone who spoke the truth about Katyn in the Polish People’s Republic risked persecution. Censorship ensured that only Soviet-approved information reached the mass media. Even courts, in cases brought by families of murder victims seeking legal declarations of death, incorrectly recorded death dates as 1941 or later.

One of the most dramatic protests against the falsification of the Katyn crime was made by Walenty Badylak, who set himself on fire in Kraków’s Main Market Square in March 1980. The regime’s media briefly reported the death of an allegedly mentally ill pensioner. However, people knew the truth and showed their respects by bringing candles and flowers to the site of the tragic event.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Amidst democratic changes, the Soviet authorities admitted in April 1990 that the Katyn massacre was one of ‘the gravest crimes of Stalinism.’ Between 1990 and 1992, the Kremlin released some Katyn-related documents. The Russian military prosecutor’s office even launched an investigation that seemed promising – at least in the beginning.

From there, however, Moscow went backwards. The investigation was discontinued in 2004, and a significant portion of the collected material – including the final decision – remains classified to this day. The Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation does not consider the Katyn massacre an act of genocide but rather an ordinary crime, now subject to the statute of limitations. Moreover, Russian public discourse still features voices denying Soviet culpability.

This makes the investigation conducted by the Institute of National Remembrance’s prosecution office all the more vital. We will not rest until we have fully determined the circumstances of this crime. The victims call for remembrance and history for steadfast defenders of the truth.

Karol POLEJOWSKI

Polish medieval historian. Deputy President of the Institute of National Remembrance.

Ryc. Fabien Clairefond

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